15. _Professor John Stuart Blackie._—In presenting the views of those entitled to be heard on this question it only remains now to give the conclusions arrived at by Professor Blackie, who is acquainted with Gaelic and thoroughly familiar with all the facts. He holds that the question has never yet been examined in a strictly philological fashion. After going through the whole of the originals recently he holds, in opposition to Mr Campbell, that the Gaelic is unquestionably the original. He brings forward five tests by which a translator’s hand is clearly discoverable:— (1.) In the English version, awkward, forced, and unidiomatic expressions frequently occur, which can be clearly traced to the influence of a Gaelic original. (2.) In all poems of any antiquity handed down in manuscripts difficulties will occur, arising from obsolete words, errors in transcription, confused connection, and other causes. In such cases it is a common practice with translators to skip the difficulty, gloss over the matter with some decent commonplace, and sometimes to make positive blunders, which it is not difficult for a philologer to expose. All these signs of a translator’s hand are frequent in Macpherson’s English, and would be more so had he not indulged in such a habit of skipping generally, that it is difficult to say in certain cases decidedly that the skip was made because the writer of the English wished to shirk a difficulty. (3.) It is a common practice with translators, when they find a passage a little obscure, to remove the obscurity by some manifest alteration of the phrase, or even by interpolating a line or interlarding a commentary. This also occurs in Macpherson. (4.) It is not always that a translator writes under the same vivid vision, or the same fervid inspiration as the original poet. The instance of failure to seize the most striking features of the original, and the substitution of generic for specific epithets are frequent in Macpherson. (5.) Most translators yield—sometimes, no doubt, wisely—to the temptation of improving on their originals, and Macpherson, from what we know of him, was the last man in the world to think of resisting such a temptation. How much of the Gaelic as we now have it—that is, his clean copy of his own originals—was subjected to this process of beautification no one can tell, but departures from the simplicity of the original can be traced in several instances. He thinks that the English, as a whole, is a translation from the Gaelic, and not a translation of the best quality in many respects, and that this may be accepted as one of the best ascertained facts in the range of philological investigation. Philological induction, combined with the amount of external evidence to be found in the Highland Society’s report, produce a cumulative proof which he is most anxious to see how Mr Campbell can rebut. Principal Shairp thinks that Professor Blackie has hit upon the true solution of this controversy.